盯眼睛没用？研究发现这么做反而更容易被骗｜科学60秒

在年轻人的团建和大聚会中，“狼人杀”“谁是卧底”称得上是最好入门的破冰游戏。开局时，人们经常自信满满地认为，只要紧盯对方的眼神和微表情，便能将骗子一眼识破。然而，一轮游戏结束，卧底和狼人留在了牌桌，出局的却是那些“看起来最可疑”的人。等到彻底结束的复盘才发现，我们自以为很会识谎，之前的推理却都是错的。对于被“误杀”的人来说，撒谎也远比想象中难。

全球真人秀节目《叛徒》（The Traitors）的规则与这两款游戏类似：23 名参与者中，有 20 人是“老实人”，剩下三人则是“叛徒”。叛徒必须在整场游戏中伪装成老实人，不能被识破，老实人的任务则是通过投票将叛徒一一揪出并淘汰。

How The Traitors reveals the psychology behind lying

Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.

The global reality TV show franchise The Traitors has a simple premise: among a cast of, say, 23 people, roughly 20 are “faithfuls,” and about three are “traitors.” The job of the traitors is to lie so they remain undetected. The job of the faithfuls is to suss them out.

All of that led SciAm’s breaking news reporter Jackie Flynn Mogensen to wonder, “What does science have to tell us about how to spot liars? And what can it tell us about how to be more effective liars?”

She recently wrote about all this and is here to spill the deets. But before we get started, if you’re interested in the current U.S. season of The Traitors and haven’t seen it, be warned there will be spoilers.

Hi, Jackie. Thanks for joining us today.

Jackie Flynn Mogensen: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Pierre-Louis: So for those who haven’t seen the show, can you tell us a little bit about what Traitors is?

Mogensen: Yes, so Traitors is essentially a reality TV game show that is a lot like the party game Mafia, if you’ve ever played it, where there is a group of traitors within the group and everyone else are faithfuls. The goal for the faithfuls is to vote out the traitors, and the goal of the traitors is to pretend to be faithful for the length of the game.

And the cast, it’s usually, for the U.S. version, a cast of celebrities ...

Pierre-Louis: Mm-hmm.

Mogensen: Reality TV stars, Olympic athletes, actors, etcetera. And at stake is a prize pot worth $250,000.

Pierre-Louis: I know the season just recently ended. Can you tell us a little bit about how this season went?

Mogensen: This was one of the best seasons that I’ve seen so far, and I have watched the Australia version as well. [Laughs.] And I think it was just overall, really a master class in lying by Rob Rausch from Love Island, who ended up winning the show. He does a fantastic job of blending in as a faithful and ultimately [does] a really great job of lying to his fellow castmates. And he basically goes pretty much undetected the whole season and in the end betrays some of his closest allies, which was very sad to watch, but also made really great television.

Pierre-Louis: What made you decide that this was worthy of, like, scientific exploration?

Mogensen: Well, first of all, I am a superfan of the show. I started watching a few seasons ago. And people in the office I know are also fans, too, and combined with y’all’s Heated Rivalry episode from earlier this year—I was really inspired by that. I felt like it could be a good opportunity to dive into the science of one of my favorite shows, too.

Pierre-Louis: One of the big things in the show and that you really get into [in] your reporting is essentially, like, the science of lying. And I feel like humans have been obsessed with the idea of figuring out how to tell if someone is lying. But one of the things your article points out is, generally, we’re pretty bad at it. I think there was a meta-analysis that looked at a bunch of studies and found that, on average, people are about 50–50 at detecting liars. Why are we so bad at it?

Mogensen: This is a question I did ask some of my sources in my reporting. I think there’s a few reasons. I think one of the main ones is that we let our biases get in the way, and that’s one of their main strategies—if you were to be in the show The Traitors or if you want to be better at detecting lies, something to do is just throw out the biases you have about other people and lying itself.

So for instance, one of the key misunderstandings that I heard from both sources is that liars, if they’re telling a lie, won’t look you in the eye ...

Pierre-Louis: Mm-hmm.

Mogensen: But that’s actually not true at all. Liars, if they’re good, know that’s what people expect, and they will purposely look you in the eye, whereas, you know, in this conversation right now I’m thinking about what I might say next; I look to the side. That’s not an indication of lying. [Laughs.] At least I hope you don’t think so. But in general people look to the side when they’re thinking about what to say next, and that, that’s not necessarily lying. So that’s one example of a bias that you might have about lying going into a show like The Traitors.

Pierre-Louis: One of the things that I thought was interesting is that we’re better at detecting lying if we don’t pay attention to physical cues, if we just focus on the voice. That was quite shocking to me.

Mogensen: Yeah, that was interesting. I think that was from one of my sources, Sharon Leal, who’s a senior research fellow at the University of Portsmouth in England. She studies lie detection, and I asked her—and she’s also a fan of the show. I asked her, “What would you do if you were on The Traitors?” And she said [essentially], “I would completely throw out all physical lie-detection mechanisms; I’d basically just listen to what people are saying and try to listen to—for inconsistencies,” because she knows how often our biases or perceptions of what other people’s body movements—how often that gets in the way of lie detection.

And so that was her advice as an expert, and I think I would listen to it, too, if I was on The Traitors [Laughs] because there’s a lot of other things that can get in the way of accurate lie detection. And it’s not a foolproof science. You can never for certain know if somebody is lying or not, as far as we know. But there are other tips that they shared as well.

Pierre-Louis: What are some of the other ones?

Mogensen: So going back to body language, there are some things that they’ve found in research that people who are lying tend to do. I mean, again, it’s not foolproof, but people tend to stop moving as much when they’re lying. They don’t use their hands when they speak as much, or they’re slower. And that might be because lying takes cognitive effort; it takes more cognitive effort to lie than it does to tell the truth. It’s sort of like if you’re walking on the street and you get a text, you’ll often stop to answer the text. It’s your brain saying, “I just wanna focus on this one thing at a time.” And so that’s one thing liars might do.

Another thing is, if you notice someone’s smile, if it ends really abruptly, that could be a sign that it’s not a true smile. You know, true smiles tend to fade more slowly.

And then the other thing is—to be aware of is just, given how much cognitive effort it takes to lie, is something called “cognitive interviewing.” One strategy within cognitive interviewing, for instance, is asking a person to recall what happened to them in reverse. And they actually did a study on this in 2008 and found that police officers were better at detecting lies about an incident when sort of mock suspects told their recollection of that event in reverse. And I think that that’s just because it’s easier to access memories when they’re true, and when you’re trying to stick to one straight story, it’s kind of hard to recollect backwards, essentially.

Pierre-Louis: So I’ve never played Mafia or Traitor, but I have played Two Truths and a Lie, and I’m good at it. And one of the reasons I think I’m good at it is because I tend to pick truths that are kind of, like, outlandish and don’t seem like they’re real. So, like, one of my favorite truths is that I’ve seen a polar bear in the wild, and people just don’t think that a girl from New York City will have seen a polar bear in the wild. And then for my lie I usually pick something that is true and then twist it slightly.

Mogensen: Mm.

Pierre-Louis: So it’s not a big change; it’s a small change, and that small change makes it a lie.

And that raises a question, which is, like, so far we’ve been really focused on how to tell if someone’s lying, but on Traitors some of the people really need to be good liars. So how do we become better liars?

Mogensen: Yeah, that’s an excellent question. I think a lot of the research focuses on lie detection because it’s oftentimes a tool used in the criminal-justice system, for instance, and that’s why the researchers are interested.

Less focus, I think, just based on my, you know, read of the literature for this piece, is that there’s research into how to be a good liar, but a lot of it is kind of taking advantage of what you might already know:What is someone’s biases they may already have? How can you play into that? Like you just explained in your example about Two Truths and a Lie: “How close...[full transcript]